Sermon — September 1, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Well, it’s Labor Day tomorrow and only the real hard core has showed up to church today, so we’re going to have fun. I’m going to see if, in the next thirteen minutes or so, I can convince you to become full-on Bible-thumpers. In a way. My crazy proposition for today is this: Sometimes the only way to defend yourself against the moralistic criticism of the holier-than-thou is to know the Bible well. To put it another way: If someone’s trying to condemn you or control you in the name of God, sometimes the Bible is part of the problem; but often, it’s part of the solution, too.

And Jesus knew this well. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus confronts a group of people who try to use their own religious beliefs to condemn his disciples, and he doesn’t do it by backing off from Scripture. He does it by embracing what’s actually in the Bible; by insisting that if Scripture doesn’t require him to do something, neither can you, and thereby setting his disciples free from their demands.

This confrontation isn’t about any of the culture-war issues of our day. The Pharisees aren’t arguing with him about sexual orientation or gender identity, the ordination of women or access to abortion or any of the many other things on which churches today disagree. They’re attacking him because they see thatsome of his disciples are eating with unwashed hands.

This is not advice for your Labor Day barbecue. They’re not talking about washing your hands with soap and water before you cook or eat, to wash bacteria and dirt away. They’re talking about a ritual purification. In some later Jewish traditions, it takes the form of pouring water from a cup over each hand three times before a meal. It’s not about hygiene, but about purity.

The very fact that this practice existed, and was widespread enough that Jesus could be criticized for some of his disciples not doing it, reflects a trend in ancient Judaism of expanding the scope of purity laws from the Temple to daily life, from the holiest days to the everyday.

In the system of Biblical law in the Old Testament, “purity” is not a moral or an ethical status; it’s a ritual one. It’s not “wrong” to be impure. Sometimes it’s right, or even required. Impurity results from a wide enough variety of things that an ordinary person living an ordinary life should expect to be in a state of “impurity” with some regularity. And that wasn’t a problem. Purity was only required in the presence of holy things in the Temple, a place where most ordinary people only went for major holidays a few times a year. If you were just living in a village somewhere in Galilee, the whole system of purity laws meant you needed to immerse yourself in a ritual bath every once in a while, before the highest holy days. As far as religious rituals go, these purity regulations were not really a big deal.

Now, this is deeply dissatisfying to the pious religious mind. Surely, we devoted people tend to think, religion must be harder than that. If it’s good to be pure in the Temple, then it’s good to be pure all the time. And there’s clear archeological evidence that over time, these practices of purification took on a life of their own. We find ritual baths spread throughout the ancient Jewish world, even far from Jerusalem, and descriptions of purification that are detached from the Temple, as people who technically didn’t need to be “pure” began to practice ritual purification as part of daily life.

Handwashing is just a small example of this trend. It originates in a single commandment in Exodus that instructs the priests, the sons of Aaron, to wash their hands and feet before they go to the altar, to ensure that the hands that touch the holy food offered to God are not impure. (Ex. 30:17-20)  But like many pious practices, it expanded over time. If it’s good for the priests to wash their hands before they touch the food that will be sacrificed on the altar, isn’t it even better for us all to wash our hands before we touch food of any kind? It certainly can’t hurt.

And the context is important, too. Remember that Mark is writing down Jesus’ words a few decades after Jesus spoke them, most likely a few years after the Temple had been destroyed. When the rituals in the Temple could no longer take place, the rituals that had happened around the worship in the Temple began to take their place: and so as early Christianity began to emerge and separate from the rest of the Jewish society around it, these practices like handwashing became even more widespread, even though the reason for ritual purity to exist was no longer there.

Jesus didn’t mind, either way. Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples not to wash their hands before meals because in the Bible, that was only required of the priests. And you can tell this because the Pharisees’ concern is that some of Jesus’ disciples weren’t washing their hands, which means that some of them were. But the Pharisees come to Jesus and confront him. They ask, “Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5)

And that’s when Jesus gets a little mad.

“Now just you wait,” he seems to say. “Now I know who Isaiah was talking about when he talked about people who worship God in vain, ‘teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” (Mark 7:7) It was you! There’s nothing wrong with adopting some extra pious practice for yourself, but don’t you dare insist on it for everyone else. You can hear the echo of our first reading from Deuteronomy in Jesus’ mind: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take anything away.” (Deut. 4:2) But the Pharisees have elevated their own traditions, which are fine in and of themselves, to the status of God’s own law.

And then Jesus goes on, turning things around with an accusation of hypocrisy. You, who are not priests descended from the sons of Aaron, follow commandments you don’t need to, in line with human traditions that say you should; but you abandon the commandments of charity and love. You lose sight of what it is that really defiles, he says: not impure hands touching food before it goes into our mouths, but impure hearts from which evil intentions come. I don’t know whether Jesus’ accusation is fair. Perhaps the Pharisees in front of him weren’t quite so bad as that. But he’s making a real point, recalling people’s attention to the commandments at the heart of what it is to follow God.

In this story, Jesus defends his disciples against a pious complaint by adopting a kind of strict Biblical interpretation. And he can only do this because he’s deeply familiar with the text. He knows where the commandment in Exodus ends, and where human traditions begin. He’s confident in quoting Isaiah off the bat. He doesn’t use this knowledge to condemn those of his own followers who want to adopt this special pious act. But he does use it to defend those who are under attack.

Jesus would make a darn good Episcopalian, I think. Or rather—we Episcopalians have a chance here, to become even better followers of Christ: to embrace and act upon our values of inclusion and love, not by shying away from the text of the Bible but by diving further in, by finding and learning

To take just one small example: Over the summer, we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the first ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. For centuries, women’s ministry had been restricted to the ministry of laypeople; for more than a thousand years, women were told there was no place for them at the altar. Sometimes the Bible was quoted. Sometimes it was human tradition, whether religious sexism or misogynistic philosophy. But in fact, the Bible is relatively clear. Women played a leading role in the leadership of the early Church. Not only the women who followed Jesus to the tomb, and were the apostles to the apostles, the first ones to proclaim Easter’s good news. Not only the women like Lydia who led early gatherings of the disciples. But women who are given the titles of what would become ordained ministries, like “Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae,” (Romans 16:1), and Junia, who is “prominent among the apostles.” (16:7) It’s no surprise that it was the most Protestant churches, least bound to human tradition and most drawn to the Bible, who began ordaining women first, then Episcopalians later with our murky in-between, and who knows whether our more siblings in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, where tradition is elevated to the same level as Scripture, will ever allow the same.

So, okay: Maybe you’re not ready to Bible-thump quite yet. But I want to encourage you to read the Bible, at least; to mark, as one of our prayers says, and learn, and inwardly digest it; because it can be not only the source of inspiration, comfort, and strength; it can be the source of liberation too, as Jesus knew so well.

Sermon — August 25, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There comes a point in every one of our lives when we must make a choice between two different paths. There’s no compromise, no way to split the difference. There are two roads laid out before us, one here and one there, and we have to decide which one we’re going to follow.

I’m talking, of course, about the difficult choice between following the road signs and the GPS.

Now, I drive a remarkably-reliable eleven year old car, which came with a wonderful but now quite unreliable built-in navigation system. It’s the kind of early 2010s device where if you want updated maps, you have to send away for a USB drive to plug in and update them, and I have to admit, I never have.

And so there are certain parts of certain routes where, a decade after installation, my GPS is just entirely wrong. Sometimes this happens when I know the route, as when the GPS tries to send me whirling around a rotary that no longer exists, somewhere in Somerville. It more often happens on some highway somewhere out of state, where the entry and exit ramps have moved around, and the GPS tells me to go straight for half a mile, then change between I-95 and I-91 by sailing off through the sky on a ramp that’s no longer there. (Which, to be fair, would not even be the worst driving I’ve seen in New Haven, Connecticut.)

Anyway, at those moments you face a choice between two different sources of authority offering two different visions of reality, and you need to choose which one to trust, and which one to follow. And in a way, this is what every one of our readings this morning is about.

Our first reading tells the story of the choice that Joshua offered to the ancient Israelites at the very end of their journey into the Promised Land. The people have crossed the Red Sea on their way out of slavery in Egypt, led by Moses. They’ve wandered forty years in the wilderness, complaining all the way, and Moses has seen the Promised Land from the mountaintop before he dies. Now Joshua has led them in, and they’ve battled with the people of the land. And years later, after a long time of peace, Joshua’s life is drawing to its end, and he gathers all the people and offers them a choice.

Remember the stories of your ancestors, he tells them: remember Terah and Abraham and Nahor, who lived beyond the river and served other gods. Remember their descendants, you parents and grandparents, the ones who were enslaved in Egypt, and served Egyptian gods there. Remember the gods your ancestors served, and how that went for them.

And remember the story of the God we now serve, and what that God has done for you. Remember how he brought your parents up out of slavery. Remember how he protected them through those long years in the wilderness. Remember how he led you into this Promised Land.

(And for this Sunday, at least, let me just acknowledge that the old stories of conquest and violence as the people came into the land have echoed down the ages, with very real effects. And let me say that if you’re curious about the intersection between these stories and Israeli-Palestinian relations today, I’m happy to talk about that any time; even though I’m not going to talk about it right now.)

So Joshua offers a choice between two ways: you can choose the gods your ancestors served long ago and far away, you can follow their traditions and practice their ancient rites; or you can choose the God who brought you up out of Egypt, and set you free. But one way or another you must “choose this day whom you will serve.” (Joshua 24:15)

More than a thousand years later, another Joshua arose, another leader among the people of that land. We tend to call this one what the Greeks and Romans called him. Their languages had no sh sound, and ended masculine words in s, and Hebrew pronunciation had changed as well, so they spelled his name not Yeshu’ but Jesus. In other words, we call him Jesus, but Jesus and Joshua are the same name.

And like that ancient Joshua, Jesus offered the people around him a choice; implicitly, this time, but a choice all the same. He didn’t ask them to choose between one god and another. Nearly everyone who appears in all the stories in the gospels was faithful to the one God of the Jewish people. Their choice, in our reading this morning, was whether they could accept the strange teachings of this man, the almost-grotesque idea that they should “eat [his] flesh and drink [his] blood,” which we talked about at some length last week. (John 6:56)

“This teaching is difficult,” his disciples said when he told them this. “Who can accept it?” (6:60) And it’s actually unusual, how this story goes. Here, it’s not “the Jews” or “the Pharisees” or “the Sadducees” who criticize Jesus’ teaching, as the various gospels often say. It’s “his disciples,” the people who’ve faithfully followed him so far. He teaches something strange and hard, and they complain. But Jesus doesn’t yield, he doubles down on his claims, and “because of this, many of his disciples turned away.” (6:66)

But a faithful remnant remains, a core group built around the twelve, the ones who we will come to call apostles. And they don’t stay, you might notice, because they think that this teaching is easy to believe. They don’t even acknowledge that what he’s saying might be true. They don’t stay because they accept his words. They stay because they believe in him. They trust him. And so, Peter answers on their behalf, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (6:68)

They’ve made the choice that he’s the one who knows how the right directions, and they’re going to follow him, wherever the rest of the traffic may be going. They’ve decided that, however strange some of what he says may seem, he is, to paraphrase what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel of John, not only “the truth” and “the life”; he is “the Waze.” (I’m so sorry. I am, in fact, a dad.)

So the disciples choose to follow Jesus. And they choose again to stay the course, to remain faithful when others back away. But it’s not until much later that the disciples feel what Paul calls “boldness.” It’s not until much later that their faith transforms from something that they have to struggle to accept, to something that gives them strength, a shield and helmet and armor that protects them from all the evils of the world. This “boldness” is one of Paul’s favorite words, and he means the kind of extraordinary strength it takes to stand up and declare the truth when it’s much easier to say nothing. To stand for what is good in a world that’s often beset by evil. And to remain not only confident in but comforted by what you know to be true, even when the people around you are shocked.

There’s a kind of growth in these stories, from decision to faithfulness to boldness. And you could imagine this as a typical trajectory in spiritual life. The story of your faith might have a beginning, when you make the decision to follow, the decision to choose which god to serve; when you choose who gets to be your judge and what values will shape your life. This is when you choose which way to go. The story might have a middle, in which your faith is tested; in which the road becomes more difficult, when you’re not so sure that your decision was right, or something unexpected happens, and you wish you’d gone the other way, after all. And then later, the story might end with a kind of boldness, a sense of certainty that you’ve gone the right way, and a comfort that the destination is finally in sight.

And yet the story of a life is rarely as simple as 1, 2, 3; decision, faithfulness, boldness. They’re not really three phases of a story, after all, neatly ordered in a row. They’re three episodes, three common patterns of life, that we cycle through again and again and again. It sometimes seems that every week or every month or every year, we have to choose to commit ourselves again to the things that we believe, and it can become a burden. But it’s also a gift: the fact that we need to choose again and again to do the right thing means that we get to choose again and again. We are given a thousand chances to follow in Jesus’ way of love, and when we choose the wrong path, it’s never too late to get off at the next exit, and take a U-turn, however inconvenient it may be.

Sermon — August 18, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to the crowd who have come to hear from him, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) And over the course of history, down to the present day—perhaps down to this very morning—people have responded to these words in many ways. But there are three kinds of responses I want to talk about especially today, and I’ll summarize them as: 1) “So gross!” 2) “So great!” and 3) “So what?”

(As with anything a preacher says, this is a massive over-simplification. But you and I both know that, oratorically speaking, at least, things always go better in threes.)

So, first: “So gross!” In the Church today, we tend to use phrases like “receiving the Body of Christ” when we talk about Holy Communion. Jesus’ own language seems blunter, almost cruder. “Eat my flesh.” “Drink my blood.” That’s kind of gross!

You might think that there’s something lost in translation, here, of course, either linguistically or culturally. Sometimes that’s the case with the Bible. It’s often the preacher’s task to talk about the nuance of a Greek or Hebrew word, to share some detail of history or culture to help the text make sense. I’m sorry to say, this morning it only makes the problem worse. There are, in typical style, two different ancient Greek words for “eat,” but the one used here is in fact the grosser word;. It’s not just the general word φάγω, which is where the Greek yogurt brand FAGE gets its name: it means, “Eat!” It’s the word τρώγω, which one dictionary defines as “to bite or chew food,” and to “eat (audibly)… chew, nibble, munch.”^[1] It’s the less abstract, more mechanical word.

It’s not a question of cultural context either. This talk of “drinking blood” might’ve been even more repulsive to Jesus’ fellow Jews than it is to us. Many Christian cultures include things like blood sausages or black pudding, but the Torah explicitly forbids the eating of blood—including for Gentiles, by the way, since it was part of God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood—and many of the practices of kosher butchering are specifically intended to ensure that people eat no blood. Talking about consuming blood at all would be shocking enough, let alone human blood. So if you hear Jesus’ words, his repeated insistence that we eat his flesh and drink his blood, and you feel uneasy—well, you should. And you’re not the only one. We’ll hear next week how Jesus’ words start to drive away the crowd, and no wonder, because this is so gross.

And yet in some ways, Jesus’ words here also sound so great when you put them in the right context: not a historical or cultural context, but a liturgical and theological context. What if this is about the Eucharist? What if Jesus is talking about receiving Communion? “Eat” and “drink,” “flesh” and “blood,” naturally remind us of “bread” and “wine,” and we know where to find those. Even by the time the Gospel of John was being written, this was most likely an intentional connection: for two thousand years, we’ve had a weekly ritual of eating and drinking. Jesus is just telling us what it means.

And this is a remarkable thing. Nearly every ancient religion (and most modern ones) has religious rituals around food. Typically, you’d come to worship with a gift for your god, often a sacrifice of food. You’d burn for the god to eat, you’d eat some, and you’d think this was a holy thing: you were sharing a meal with your god. The Eucharist is something more. You’re not hosting a meal for your god, and eating in the god’s presence; God is feeding you from God’s own being. It’s entirely an act of grace.

I think often of the vow I took at ordination to “nourish God’s people from the riches of God’s grace,” and I try to do that as well as I can. But really, it’s God who nourishes each one of us from the riches of God’s grace. It’s Jesus who nourishes each one of us from his own body. Our true “soul food” is his own flesh and blood, and this becomes the foundation of a lifelong bond, a connection which we’re invited to renew week after week after week.

This meal isn’t only a memorial. It isn’t only something we do to remember something Jesus did. It’s something God does to feed and sustain us now and always. Eating flesh and drinking blood may be pretty gross; being fed week after week by God is pretty great.

But there’s something strange about Jesus’ words here. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he says. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51) “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” he repeats later, (6:54) and he concludes, “the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (6:58)

 And yet we die.

Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, and they died; but you will live for ever, Jesus says. We know that this bread doesn’t make us live forever. It might bring us into closer communion with God. It might be an incredible gift that feeds and sustains us in this life. But it doesn’t extend our lives; there are no thousand-year-old saints among us. And even though we’re fed and nourished by God in this life, life is still pretty hard, and we still hunger and still thirst, literally and spiritually. And so you might be left with the question, “So what?” as in, “If we don’t live forever, and our hunger isn’t sated, Jesus may be living bread, but so what? What difference does it really make?”

I think it makes all the difference.

I think I’ve said this to you before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but the most meaningful part of our whole liturgy for me is what I get to I say as I distribute the bread: “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” Every week it moves me, as I walk along that rail. This is the bread of heaven. This is what they’re eating there. This is a taste of the feast God’s Wisdom has prepared, which we will one day share, not only with one another, not only with God, but with the whole heavenly host, with all those who have gone before us, and all those who will come after.

I think of that, every week, because I suspect that for every one of us, there is someone (or many someones), with whom we would give anything to share one more meal. There are people I think of, as I give this bread to you. People in all our lives who we have loved and who are no longer here. To me, to say that this is “the bread of heaven” is to say that they are sharing this meal now; that they are somehow here, and that this is just a promise of greater things to come.

That’s what “forever” means, when Jesus says we will live forever: not that we will live forever here, in this life on this earth, but that we will live forever there, with them. That we will live, as they will live; that he will raise us up with them on that last day.

Jesus doesn’t only offer a strange command in the Gospel today, to eat his flesh and drink his blood; a command so unsettling that it began to drive his disciples away. And he doesn’t only offer a meal, the promise of food that will feed us day to day, sustaining us on our journey through this life. He offers us a promise, the promise that this is eternal bread; that this is a meal that stretches beyond the boundaries of time, a foretaste of the meal that we will once again share with those who’ve gone before us.

The promise Jesus makes is that when Wisdom prepares that eternal meal, God will say to us, “Turn in here!” “Come, eat of my bread,” and we will share that bread of heaven again, no longer separated from one another by the barriers of death but finally restored to life and to love. And I don’t know about you, but that is a hope that really does feed my soul.

^[1] BDAG, s.v. “τρώγω,” 1019.